Essy’s owner kept her in a small enclosure on his property with his other horses. One of the other horses was a stallion. He impregnated Essy because she had nowhere to run when he began pursuing her in that tight, crowded space.
While trying to avoid him, she repeatedly pushed and bumped into the other horses until one of them became irritated enough to kick her. Tragically, that kick shattered the knee bones in her left front leg.
When her owner eventually noticed that she was struggling to move around in his pen, he refused to spend any money for an examination by an equine vet. After ignoring her injury for several weeks, but suspecting that she was pregnant, he knew that his best chance of getting some money for her, with that injury, was to sell her and the foal she was carrying directly to the local Kill Guy. He somehow managed to get her into his two-horse trailer and drove her to the local sale barn.
At a typical, rural livestock Sale Barn, horses not sold at auction are often sold by the pound, for their meat value, to a buyer called the Kill Guy. This buyer of last resort then packs those horses into a Kill Pen, adjacent to the sale barn, without food, water, or medical care, until he has enough of them to fill an 18-wheel livestock trailer. When he has enough unwanted horses for a truck load, he crams them into those trailers as tightly as possible, again without food or water. They are then driven for 22 to 40 hours, over 1100 to 2000 miles, to various slaughter plants scattered around Mexico.
When Essy and her owner got to the Sale Barn, the kill guy quickly bought her, despite her knee injury, because she was pregnant.  These buyers for slaughter plants love buying pregnant mares because they get, in one horse, a compact bundle of meat that takes up less space than two horses in the 18-wheeler trailer.
The holding pen was not full that day, so it would be a week, or more, before he had accumulated enough horses for a full load. With no sense of kindness or humanity, and only being interested in maximizing his profits, he too would not spend any money on food or pain medication for her.
As the Kill Guy bought more discarded, unwanted horses, and the Kill Pen became increasingly congested, he could see that Essy, the pregnant one with the broken knee, was getting weaker every day. He began to doubt that she could survive the long trip to Mexico, and he knew that the slaughter plants wouldn’t pay him for a dead horse. His primary goal, at that point, was getting the money back that he had paid for Essy before she died in that Kill Pen.
A few months earlier he had sold a sick colt to an equine rescuer and had kept her contact information. Though it was a Sunday, that angel rescuer took his call and agreed to get into her truck and pull her horse trailer to the kill pen to at least see Essy. Her reaction to what she saw “fluctuated between anger, heartbreak, despair, and anxiety” for this gravely injured, and severely malnourished mare. Her first thought was that there wasn’t anything she could do for Essy. It was just too late. But this pregnant mare pulled on the rescuer’s heart strings long enough and hard enough until she sucked up her feelings of hopelessness and managed to get Essy out of the kill pen and into her trailer.
She drove Essy directly to her equine vet that Sunday for an emergency examination, x-rays of her knee, and an ultrasound to verify her pregnancy. Labs and the exam showed that in addition to being about 180 days pregnant, she also was suffering from a deep, upper respiratory infection.
The knee x-ray verified that she was crippled as a result of an old injury that had not been treated in a timely manner. The joint was now calcified into a contorted and malformed shape making splints, braces, or surgery unrealistic.
The rescuer finally got Essy home to her barn at the end of that long day. She immediately put her on strict stall rest, with good hay, special food supplements to address her malnutrition, and plenty of fresh water. The question in the rescuer’s mind now was could Essy survive long enough to deliver her innocent baby.

Fast forward another 5 months, and after many 20mg doses of prednisolone to ease the pain in her left leg, Essy’s baby was born. The delivery was normal, and the little mare foal was in excellent health.
No horse can survive for long on 3 legs. Though her rescuer has done everything possible to restore her health and make Essy comfortable, the hope now is that she can hold on long enough to continue nursing her beautiful colt Ziva for the first 6 months of her baby’s life while she imparts the nutrients and natural immunity her baby needs to survive without her.
In the meantime, Essy loves being Ziva’s mom, showing great affection for her vivacious colt while she watches her baby growing rapidly and finding much joy in exploring and investigating her new world. Essy’s left front leg, however, continues to deteriorate making it less and less likely that she will be able to stand up again each morning. When she is down permanently, with sadness and great reluctance, her rescuer will have to help her begin her final journey to her true forever home.
Fulfilling its mission of relieving the suffering of innocent and helpless dogs, cats and horses, Animals Abused & Abandoned has paid for all of Essy’s and Ziva’s veterinarian and medication expenses, as well as food and nutrition supplements, and will continue to do so until Essy’s time has come, and the rescuer finds a kind and loving forever home for Ziva.